A place of childrens' stories, funny blogs, unasked-for advice, stuff I've learned that might save you time and trouble, the perfect marriage (?), and other interesting stuff.

Works in Progress

That’s what we are; works in progress. Seldom do you meet someone who knows exactly what they want in life. These lucky few know what they want and they go through life confident and expecting to win at whatever they do. More power to them!

But as for the rest of us, we muddle on, doing the best we can, making mistakes and learning from them. What counts is that we try. It’s a fact that we will have some good days, and sometimes some great days. Often there will be hard days, or plain old bad days. But we go along as best we can.

Often it is those bad days that teach us the most. It certainly isn’t fun, but it’s a learning experience. I used to be filled with righteous indignation about a lot of things when I was younger. Now when I think of who I was then, I can’t believe I was ever that arrogant.

Ah well, these are the things that, as my mother used to say, make you turn red in the night thinking of them and wishing you didn’t do what you did. There are a whole lot of people I wish I could see again and tell them how sorry I was for being such a know-it-all.

However, that’s life. That’s part of our own ‘work in progress.’ We grow, we learn, we change, and we move on. We do the best we can, and hope for the best. It’s a wonderful thing when we can get into bed at night, review the day and think to ourselves, ‘I did all right today.’

My mother, when working on our family’s genealogy, liked doing gravestone rubbings. This of course was way before the technology we have today. To do the rubbing you would hold the paper against the stone where the name, dates, and so on was, and apply the pencil to the paper. This would give you a copy to take home.

Mom found a message she loved that simply read “She hath done what she could.” Not a bad commentary of a life well lived. May we all do what we can.

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One thought on “Works in Progress”

Oh, I think of my young, unmarried, no-children self, as a know-it-all young teacher, telling harried parents gently that CONSISTENCY is the thing…and then becoming a parent to a special needs child and understanding so much more. If only we could apply wisdom retroactively!